Nico Amador’s “Adams”

Nico Amador traces abandoned lineages, in a poem from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Nico AmadorOctober 8, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

Adams

New England towns in late autumn
make a cold, unfurnished welcome.
 
Their pines lined up in stiff elocution,
white trim skirting the houses like the lace
you refused as a child, a strange insistence,
 
and not unlike these deer congregated
at dusk, the voice inside you
                     accepting their beauty.
 
The ghosts here are not your ghosts.
 
They push through the damp bricks,
a vacant factory’s long conveyors, rusted
machines that once made war possible.
 
They peer out from their milky windows
as you skulk around, certain the past
wouldn’t find you here, that tomorrow
 
would show you another door.
 
You wanted to be a man
like your grandfather, who lived for his work
and the coin slot of his one garden.
 
There, the honeysuckle flourished,
rabbits dozed in their hutches.
 
Every afternoon, he washed himself
under the pooled light, absolved, somehow,
for whatever cog he might have been
 
in the teeth of another man’s wheel—
what wasn’t his to control.
 
You’re not constant like he was, 
not with your own name, not with any place
or the face you show to it.
 
How could you be? Like him, I mean.
Men come in and out of your room like moths,
drawn to the new warmth you offer,
and you try, you do attempt to love them
 
in this narrow arm of the country—
            it’s not where you’re from.

¤

Featured image: John H. White, 37th and Prairie Streets, 1973. DOCUMERICA: The Environmental Protection Agency's Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern, National Archives (412-DA-11365). CC0, archives.gov. Accessed October 2, 2025. Image has been cropped.